We all saw the trailers for Eternals.
Most of us probably caught the movie already.
I want to point out something the MCU did that contributed to them dominating the box office.
It is a strategy that played out well and they were smart to act on it.
The trick to owning the box office is to engage the fans outside the box office.
Sure the movie has to be great, but the lead up and trailers play an important role too.
They knew fans had questions and deliberately played to those questions to engage and extend the conversation from one film to the next.
Let’s use Eternals as an example.
How to live up to the incredible hype and performance delivered by Marvel Phase 3 and the amazing narrative of all-powerful, king of combat Thanos?
How do you answer the questions that lingers at the back of all our heads as we watch Marvel introduce a new super-species of god-like entities, the eternals?
Like WHERE were the Eternals when Thanos came knocking on the front door.
Did half of the Eternals disappeared too during Thanos’ snap?
Why did the Celestials not intervene?
So many questions.
How do you answer them?
Simple.
You answer the questions directly and smack them right in the face straight from the onset — during the first trailers.
The biggest questions we had when the Eternals appeared was, where were they during Thanos’ bloody crusades?
Marvel knew that was too big a question to avoid and they simply hit it straight in the head by revealing that the Eternals were instructed specifically NOT to interfere with life unless the Deviants were involved.
Whether you buy that is another thing, but I do want to point out that bold approach that Marvel took and we can definitely learn something from that.
They knew that every fan had that question in mind and it would literally rip a hole in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that cannot be mended if left unanswered or worst, answered poorly.
Remember the writers and Fiege spent their professional careers trying to piece each Marvel movie together.
Arguably, they were doing what no one else ever attempted before.
They could have let it build up and reveal it only during the actual premiere of the movie.
But they are the masters of theatrics and understood marketing phenomenally.
They know that appealing and engaging with the fans even before the movie dropped was the key.
The MCU had an uphill battle trying to stitch decades of seemingly independent movies into an entire storyline that fits.
It is a bold task that no one has ever quite achieved, much less attempted.
See how DC tried with their Batman and Superman movies and completely missed the mark?
Don’t you kinda hate how many different kinds of Batman there since it began?
For the record, I still think Christian Bale was the baddest Batman out there.
Amazing how everything goes back to building and engaging a community.
Listen to what your community needs and engage them strategically.
MCU did a fantastic job.
Saw what happened when Zack Snyder embraced the Snyderverse his fans created for him?
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